


she said you were big enough to fill my heart, so i took the dare

by kwritten



Series: Femlash February 2016 [5]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/F, Femslash, Femslash February
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-10
Updated: 2016-02-10
Packaged: 2018-05-19 12:23:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5967325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/pseuds/kwritten
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>for the femfeb prompt: Elena/Dawn “this is not a perfect beach day” “this is the pacific northwest, this is as good as it gets”</p><p>
  <i>There is a story here about a girl that found air at the bottom of the ocean and taught the fish how to speak a language of light and dark. There is a story about a girl born with wings, destined to burn brighter than Icarus, who was saved and is still running towards destruction.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	she said you were big enough to fill my heart, so i took the dare

**Author's Note:**

  * For [happyg_rl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/happyg_rl/gifts).



If running felt like drowning, then maybe at least one of them wouldn’t feel so homesick. If it were the opposite – if running felt like flying – then maybe at least one of them wouldn’t feel like they were starting from the unknown. 

There is a story here about a girl that found air at the bottom of the ocean and taught the fish how to speak a language of light and dark. There is a story about a girl born with wings, destined to burn brighter than Icarus, who was saved and is still running towards destruction. 

As it was, running felt exactly like the word itself. Feet on the pavement, a distended moment of touch where a staccato would suffice, wind flowing on either side. It was nothing at all like standing still. 

 

 

She watched him under hooded eyes make his way from girl to girl around the bar; he’d make the perfect snack. He’d want it, too – pant under her fingers and beg her for it without any influence. She could have put him out of his misery hours ago, come within his reach and flutter up at him. Or seduce him; make him feel like the one being pursued. 

Relief, sweet blessed relief, tasted so good. 

And so she held back. Watched him flounder and fail and pursue and retreat. 

She took a sip of her drink and smirked as he once again chose the wrong prey. He’d convinced himself, at some point in his life, that he was the victor. It was why he’d always lose. 

He didn’t actually want to win. 

“Please don’t,” the low voice said somewhere in the din of the bar, reaching Elena’s vampire hearing despite the speaker not making herself known. 

Elena narrowed her eyes and scanned the crowd, certain she was mistaken. 

A half a moment later, the booth shifted slightly as a girl with long dark hair slipped in beside her. “I know you heard me,” the voice to anyone else would have been inaudible, her lips scarcely moving. 

“I’m sorry,” Elena feigned innocence, “I don’t really want company.” She forced the words to carry in the thick air, competing with the sound system and the loud group of sorority sisters in the next booth. 

The girl dimpled at her, leaning closer in a way that felt equal parts flirtatious and threatening, “I’m sure that’s not true.” Her eyes flicked to the man, now trying to flirt with the bartender. 

“Friend of yours?” Elena asked curiously, flicking her head to one side. 

The girl shrugged, “A bit too easy, don’t you think?” She leaned over, her shoulder nearly brushing Elena’s, her hair draping down to just slightly graze the top of Elena’s thighs. She smelled like something old and dusty, but also metallic and alive, just… not quite as human as the dozens of other sweaty bodies crowded together that night. An almost imperceptible difference that felt almost like a different sort of hunger, one that once awakened had the possibility to never be fully sated. “That seems a bit more interesting.”

Elena followed her gaze to a man sitting alone at the end of the bar, seemingly oblivious to the cacophony around him. He had nothing of that desperation or anger flittering about his shoulders like Elena usually sought out – the sad ones and the angry ones and the desperate ones singing songs to her blood like _home_. He was just… _bored_. 

Before she could respond, the girl was gone. 

Over the next hour, Elena watched the progression of the girl’s seduction with growing interest. When it finally ended in a cramped closet full of cleaning supplies, the girl pinned to the wall with her legs wrapped around his waist, Elena flung open the door and invited herself to the party, and she felt a little bit as though _she_ was the one who had been under surveillance. 

He shuddered when she sunk her teeth into his neck, the girl’s fingers twined up in her hair, cooing and gasping with delight. They left him alive and satisfied, forgotten at their feet. 

She tasted like warm earth and the chill of a thousand stars.   
(Sometimes, Elena was dreadfully poetic.)

“I’m Dawn,” she said in the aftermath, Elena a shivering, quaking mess beneath her fingers. 

 

 

Running after a time became as necessary as breathing, though neither required air for life in the way that they had been raised to expect. It wasn’t as simple as chasing, there was nothing left to chase. They had nothing but time and time was the only resource they needed. It wasn’t as complicated as being pursued, there was nothing left to want them. They were impossible and necessary and their immortality was a shield that kept them alive. 

Running was like a game with no rules. 

There is a story here about girls that loved too hard or too much or sacrificed everything and were left nothing but bones in the aftermath. But they didn’t write that story, it was written for them. Perhaps, you could say that they are running from the pages that they could no longer fit in anymore. You shouldn’t. But you could. 

As it was, running was the thing that they did, with relatively no effort and no consequences. Maybe their hearts were too broken to know the difference. Maybe they held each other’s hearts in their hands and everything else was a moot point. Maybe their hearts were so large, they swallowed the world. 

 

 

“This is not a perfect beach day,” Elena kicked out with her grey boots at the grey stones that made up the _beach_ and looked out at the grey water that faded into a grey sky.

She felt as though the entire world had turned grey as she slept, falling asleep somewhere in the south, with mountains rising in the distance and waking up to a grey beach and a grey sky and grey water as far as her eyes could see. 

“This is the Pacific Northwest,” Dawn smiled ruefully, tiny droplets of misty rain caught in her long hair, “this is as good as it gets.”

(She liked lying, it made the truth more beautiful when it was finally revealed.)

She wrapped her arms around Elena’s waist from behind and settled her chin on her shoulder, content to wait. Elena sighed and leaned back into her embrace, the hours and days of travel settling onto their bones for the first time since Dawn had decided – in the middle of the night – that they needed to go on a road trip.

 _Road trip_ was a loose term for _run run run_ or, more eloquently, _reinvention_. This time, Elena hadn’t sensed the restlessness coming. They’d only been in San Diego for a few months. 

Something about it had felt _too easy_ , too much like home. 

Like the year they’d spent in Atlanta, something about the accents and the sweet tea and the narrow streets had felt like a dream instead of a memory, something comfortable but in that uncanny way that humanity always felt on her shoulders now. When she’d insisted on leaving, Dawn had just shrugged her shoulders and admitted she was bored, anyhow. Which wasn’t true. Dawn had taken to Atlanta like a child in a candy store. 

Running was what they did now, hand-in-hand, as easy as that first night and always more complicated than either wanted to admit. 

The trip had taken a lot less time than Elena had anticipated. When they left Atlanta, she couldn’t stop moving until they’d landed on a beach in the south of Singapore. They’d opened up a coffee shop and stayed nearly five years, Dawn happily collected expats and creatures with unspoken histories around her like a mother hen. 

Elena waited in Dawn’s arms, listening to the other woman’s heartbeat slow and steady in her ear and beneath her skin, marveling at the stillness of her through the sunset and all through the night. 

The sunrise lit up the mountains far ahead of them first, then filtered down to catch on the city skyline, a brilliant riot of yellows and oranges and reds after the grey afternoon and the grey twilight and the black night. Dawn’s arms tightened around her waist as the colors shifting, the greens and whites and greys of the mountains competing with the reflection of the sun, the city taking its own stand, pressing forward and forward. 

It was a bit like her, in the way that most things Elena saw now days reminded her of Dawn. The vibrant greens, the way the city nestled into the surrounding wilderness in a way that suggested the city couldn’t keep winning its battle against nature for very much longer, a snow-capped peak in the background like a signpost, _the universe is watching you_ , and then the Sound, blues and greens and greys of water lapping at the view. Everything a riot, everything wild, everything in its place, spellbinding. 

“It’s the Pacific Northwest,” Dawn whispered softly. “This is as good as it gets.”

Elena turned in her arms and pressed a soft kiss to her lips.

Dawn pulled back and eyed her warily, “Is this the preamble to you saying that it’s pretty and all but you had your heart set on Paris?”

“Who the fuck says _preamble_?”

“Answer the question, asshole.”

Elena wrinkled her nose in the approximation of a smile, “If you’re staying, I’m staying.”

It was the one thing that they had always left unsaid between them. That and other life-affirming things like _I love you_ and _You’re Mine_ , words for them being more tricky than most, meaning more and somehow for all of that, meaning far, far less. 

She blinked at Elena in surprise and then whooped, picking Elena up to twirl her around. 

Nothing was permanent. Nothing was decided. _Staying_ could as easily mean five days as five months or five years or five thousand. 

But it felt like _something_. 

 

 

If I told you that a girl made of blood and words met a girl made of blood and words, would you call it a love story or a tragedy? If I told you that a girl born to bear a face that she couldn’t own met a girl made from the scraps of a warrior she wasn’t allowed to be, would you call it fate or fallacy? If I told you that a girl that burned her whole life to the ground met a girl that burned every word of her life into ash, would you call it a pretty story or the ugliest one you’d ever heard?

They didn’t invent darkness, but damn if they were going to let it define them.


End file.
